painting

It’s a Crapshoot…Picking Paint Colors Long Distance

I’m a hard-core believer that paint colors have to be tested on the wall before selection, but unfortunately that’s not possible for our house in Doha. I’m actually ecstatic that we can paint at all as our house in Japan was covered in an off-white textured wallpaper that could not be changed. And better yet, we have just discovered that there is Benjamin Moore to be had in Qatar! So if I can give my husband the paint color names and numbers in the next day or so, he can leave the paint for the painters in each room and that is what will go up on the walls in lieu of the ugly yellowish beige they would normally paint.

I always tend to choose a cool color palette for my own projects – it’s just my instinctual nature – and my plan for the house is to have it be a seamless assortment of pale grays, with a bit of pigment in some rooms where a color is called for. Gray is by far the most difficult tone to get right and there are thousands of posts and even entire blogs devoted to the color. Since I have such limited time, I’ve constrained my search to my own tried and true colors and decorator favorites. I routinely recommend Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter HC 172 and more recently Balboa Mist OC-27 to others, but I never use them for myself as they are warm grays, not cool. After quite a bit of deliberation, I’m positive I don’t want cool blue tones in the living room/dining room or in the entry and hallways, so I am pushing myself to use the light and warm gray Balboa Mist. These kind of warm grays look awful to me on the chip – very beige which you know is like a four letter word to me – but lovely on the walls.

This is the photo that inspired the use Balboa Mist in my Chicago client’s living room…

…and it has been a great success. The room is still in progress and quite neutral, but we are finding that it can handle any color thrown at it.

And the most important decision for my new place is how the color will serve as a backdrop to my silver leaf and pine byobu and the rich color of my bamboo altar table?

Inspiration photos reveal it to be a wonderful gray with greens and medium toned woods.

So I have convinced myself and it will be the main color in the house. Wish me luck as this would be my largest mistake if it is wrong!

The den will get much of my existing living room furniture and rugs so it should ideally be a blue-green gray. I’m going with Nate Berkus’s favorite Pale Smoke 1584, which is very close to the now discontinued Benjamin Moore color (from three color wheels ago – I’m dating myself!) that my New York living room was historically painted.

It is best known for his use of it in Katie Lee Joel’s Manhattan townhouse.

That’s not to say that I’m not still considering going dark and dreamy in the TV room, using something like Farrow & Ball‘s Hague Blue like I wrote about here, or even F & B‘s Claydon Blue, but those kinds of decisions will have to wait until I’m there.

My bedroom has been an easy pick – Harbor Gray AC 25 – and my only struggle is that I almost want to change the living room and dining room to this purer gray. In my heart I know it’s not the right thing to do, but this is the kind of gray I like best. It nudged out Stonington Gray HC-170 by a small margin as the Stonington has a touch more blue.

I just happened to stop by and visit our tenants in our New York City apartment yesterday where the master bedroom is still painted my (also discontinued) dream gray, a color by Sherwin Williams called Windham Gray. I dug up old photos of our bedroom there for you (you’ll recognize much of the furniture from our Tokyo place here and here) and I was able to match the paint chips to the wall. I’m feeling impressed with myself that the Harbor Gray I had chosen before going there was as close to an exact match as could be!

My elder daughter is lucky enough to be having her room entirely re-conceptualized and re-done when we get there. Blue is her unquestionable favorite color so I am going with a favorite of designers Steven Gambrel and Vincente Wolf called Iceberg 2122-50. This is the first digital chip that doesn’t do a good job of representing the color – it is much bluer and less seafoam than it looks here.

And I am cheating here as I don’t know for sure that this Jeffrey Bilhuber bedroom is actually Iceberg, but I can’t resist using it as it has some of the ideas we are planning on, including tons of one textile and accents of black. For more of her ideas for her room, she has started a Pinterest board here.

My younger daughter is getting a consolidated group of her things and her older sister’s including that divine painted armoire. For her room we are choosing a soft French green called Silver Crest 1583.

It has a very shimmery quality. She will also have deep raspberry as an accent color, but I couldn’t find any inspiration photos with that kind of colorway.

I’m also planning on using this wonderful wedding noren, which is less blue in person, as a bed hanging on a four-poster.

The guest bedroom needs a twinge of a yellow-green so it will either be November Rain OC-50…

…or Silken Pine 2144-50. I’m worried that the November Rain is too putty and the Silken Pine to literally green.

The color needs to set off these antiques – an old Tabriz and a lacquer tansu.

The bed is white iron and the bedding is all white, with a bolster made from and antique velvet pelmet.

And I think I am going to paint the office Gray Owl OC-52 just because I love the color and I want to see it on the wall. It’s a gray with quite a bit of green in it, which is why it wasn’t quite right for elsewhere.

Joan used it in her kitchen and I love it and everything she does.

It’s an option if the Balboa Mist turns out to be a fail and looks beige, which is my secret fear. This room is so seductive because it reminds me of the arched entryway into our new living room.

But I’m sticking with my Balboa Mist as my gut says it is the right choice. Opinions? I know you have them! I figure if I even get 50% of the rooms correct, then it is well worth it to just have it be done before the container arrives and the unpacking begins!

Image credits: All paint Benjamin Moore paint chips via Benjamin Moore, Farrow & Ball chips via House Beautiful, 3. Buckingham Interiors, 6.via Apartment Therapy, 7. Lindsay Reid in House Beautiful June 2011, photo credit: Amy Neunsinger, 9. Nate Berkus, photo credit: Evan Joseph, 15. Jeffrey Bilhuber in Elle Decor, photo credit: Simon Upton, 17. Beth Elsey in Atlanta Homes Magazine, photo credit: Mali Azima, 20. via Design Sponge, 22. via Decorpad, 26, via For the Love of a House, 27. via CCG Interiors. All other photos mine.

Jul 10, 2013 By tokyojinja in Color, Doha Move, Expat Life, Interior Design Tags: color, Doha, moving, paint, painting

Art…The Best Bargain at the Market

I am always asked what the best thing is to buy at a shrine sale. Indigo textiles – shibori, boro, katazome? Porcelain – Imari, Kutani, Seto? Bamboo and wood – baskets, ikanbari vases, kashigata? The assumption is always that something quintessentially Japanese is the real deal, the real steal. But the truth can be quite different. Textiles are often very expensive and for porcelain you need to really understand what you are looking at. The bamboo and wood items are easy to come by and can almost become commodities. Personally, I think art is the best bargain at the market.

1000 yen is about 10 dollars, but as the yen doesn’t go as far, it feels like only a couple of bucks. I often go through the art stacks with an eye for anything charming – Japanese provenance is not necessary – and an ear for prices. Lately I’ve been lucky, finding works on paper and canvas for about 1000 yen. Many even come in just the right frames, or ones that can be painted or spruced up. Come take a quick tour with me through my latest discoveries…

A charming French watercolor in an aged gold frame just needed to be opened and cleaned and freshened up with a colored mat.

A typical modern Japanese woodblock print had a water damaged back and mat, and even a little water damage on the print, but nothing that showed when rematted.

It’s the dotted trees with just a suggestion of cherry blossoms that sold me on this one.

An acrylic on canvas with more charm than mastery but nice color.

Sweet daisies in the oval, always a nice shape variation for an art wall. My youngest daughter claimed this one immediately.

And this weekend’s find is my favorite. This oil painting of pansies was in a big ugly frame, but I took it out and love the casual look of just the canvas on the stretcher. (And psst, truthfully, it was a bit more than 1000 yen).

You’ve seen other shrine sale art finds of mine here and here (although the butterflies weren’t 1000 yen, yet certainly a bargain), but I am not the only one to find them. Here are some great 1000 yen finds made by readers and friends…

A 1958 Oil of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, probably painted by a local returning from vacation – the signature is a Japanese name. I often come across European scenes, particularly London or Paris, painted in all kinds of styles.

I’ve gone out of my way to show fairly non-traditional items, but you can occasionally luck into some typical Japanese art such as ukiyo-e, scrolls and katagami for bargain prices. This huge shodo (Japanese calligraphy) painting was a steal at 1000 yen. It had quite a bit of water damage which was basically erased with a damp cloth and some dish soap at home. The dramatic kanji is hito or person.

To be honest, sometimes I can clean them up myself, but other times I invest a few more yen and have my local framer (he makes house calls!) do it.

I’d love to see and hear about your art bargains!

Jun 4, 2013 By tokyojinja in Artist Spotlight, Shrine Sales and Flea Markets Tags: art, flea market, hanga, painting, prints, shrine sale, works on paper

Renovation Report and a DIY…Using Indian Wood Blocks to Create “Wallpaper” in the Master Bath

So this is the lovely Madame de Montreuil wallpaper from Les Indiennes that I wanted for the master bathroom. No real reason not to get it, other than its high price and its durability in a small bathroom with poor ventilation, but I also liked the idea of a challenge in creating something similar on my own.

So those of you who have been following for a while know that in Singapore in March of 2011 I purchased these traditional floral Indian wood blocks designed to print fabric with the intent of making my own “wallpaper” in the bathroom. Like any project, there is always some other work that needs to come first and I had been waiting on the installation of the pocket door in this earlier post.

So with that finally done and the sheetrock repaired and painted in BM White Dove as the base background, I bought paint and poster paper, set up a workspace and got to work practicing my block printing technique. Wow, it was so much more difficult than I had imagined and my first attempts were just awful! I had too much paint in the tray and trouble figuring out how much blotting I needed to do before stamping. I was looking forward to an irregular organic look, but not this organic!

I wanted to try out different patterns so I did a dense one, which was waaaay too busy, but more importantly, made me realize that as this isn’t wallpaper, I don’t have a partial block print option and need to leave space between each row so it can finish cleanly around wall edges and the ceiling.

Aha! Now this was starting to look right. And I liked the idea of a band of the small flowers above the tile and bisecting the wall behind the toilet. We even considered a square border of the little flowers all around on each wall – a fillet à la the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire – but discarded it as the room is just too tiny. I did this just casually eyeballing it, so luckily my sweet and very mathematically smart husband decided to help by figuring out the exact spacing and placement for the walls.

Hours of work went into these documents and the success of the project really hinges on his work more than mine.

While the design had started to come together, the quality of the actual prints was not so good. Here’s a close-up of one of the practice flowers – you can see the paint is very thick and three-dimensional.

Then late that night it finally occurred to me to actually research how this should be done and lo and behold, I discovered I was missing one essential piece, a small rubber roller called a brayer. So day two and off to the craft store we went! The brayer solves the gunky paint issue by controlling how much goes on and keeping it on the design part of the block only and out of the deep recesses. You can see from the practice below how much better the printing looks.

We took turns and painted the bathroom all in one evening. Sweet husband would work with a T-square and level and make tiny pencil registration marks (which were so small I couldn’t photograph them) on one wall and then I would paint there. Then we would switch off for the next wall. I didn’t realize how physically exhausting this would be, but it was like an extreme workout with a few hundred lunges and squats – squat and roll the paint, climb the stepstool, push with my arms raised, climb back down, squat again. Days later and I am still extremely sore.

Here is a little video – totally unrehearsed and you can hear how tired I am as I am almost slurring my words – but in the heat of working we forgot to take any more footage. Painting on the wall was very different from painting on the poster board as the wall was much harder and absorbed less paint and I needed to really work it on by pressing, rocking and banging. I even got adept at making repairs by adding paint to the block only in the spots that hadn’t printed well.

As I said before, having the design perfectly planned and marked on the wall made this project much easier than it would have been and guaranteed a great result.

We even went so far as to plan out the exact location and dimensions of the towel bar and did not print there, leaving the space perfectly clear.

How pretty and perfect is this Florence glass towel bar from Pottery Barn? The shape of the escutcheon mimics the shape of the flowers. More on all the accessory details in the final reveal post!

I am holding back on photos for one final post showing the whole bathroom, so just keep in mind that none of these photos do justice to the room or how fabulous the painting came out. It is softer and prettier than any actual wallpaper would have been!

Master Bathroom Related Posts:
Renovation Report…Do You Throw Good Money After Bad? Thoughts on Fixing My Master Bathroom
A Day Too Late…One Perfect Bathroom Photo
Renovation Report…Pocket Door Progress
Renovation Report…Vanity Dreams or Vanity Reality?